A French woman collaborator and her baby, whose father is German, tries to return to her home followed by a throng of taunting townspeople after having her head shaven following the capture of Chartres by the Allies, August 1944. It appears that she is passing some women who suffered a similar fate. Photo by Robert Capa.

“Collaboration Horizontale”

French women who befriended the Nazis, through coerced, forced, or voluntary relationships, were singled out for shameful retribution following the liberation of France

It’s called surviving in an enemy territory. You had to play nice in order to live.

At the end of World War II, many French people accused of collaboration with Germany endured a particularly humiliating act of revenge: their heads were shaved in public.

What do you get when you put mental trauma, mob mentality, and female sexuality in a room and shake them up? You get the Shorn Women of France, who were forcibly shaved and paraded around towns as punishment for mixing with the Nazis.

The parades were known as ugly carnivals, which is a pretty good name if you’re looking at the jeering, maniacal faces in the crowds. It is impossible to forget Robert Capa’s fallen-Madonna image of a shaven-headed young woman, cradling her baby, implicitly the result of a relationship with a German soldier.

After the war many thousands of European girls were arrested, beaten, raped, or murdered for having relationships with Germans. The insane ‘crime’ was called ‘denunciation. Women were not the only ones charged with this erroneous ‘crime’, men also were charged in great numbers.